Now that Johnny Depp’s trial is over, maybe we can spend a few minutes on other issues not as important as celebrity mud slinging on national television.  A classified intelligence report is being talked about now in the press and it concerns Vladimir Putin, and it’s not pretty.  Intelligence officers who’ve read the report and who are talking to the press about it say this:

• In March, there was an assassination attempt on Putin by insiders.  Unfortunately it apparently failed.
• In April, Putin underwent treatment (some say surgery) for “advanced cancer”.  Physically he appears to be pretty frail and I recall video during his big Victory Day celebration last month he had a blanket over his lap.
• There are rumors (unconfirmed) of his impending death, and there is a lot of jockeying going on in the Kremlin.
• US intelligence is somewhat blinded now because of all the sanctions but they are staying very active as a power vacuum can be a very dangerous time.

I’ll bet that TFG is a little nervous at the prospect of losing his handler.  The new guys may not be as nice to him as Putin has.

This guy can’t die too soon, but it will be dicey when he finally does.

Let’s all keep in mind that Putin killed a new democracy in its crib back in 2000 when he took over Russia after Boris Yeltsin.  Using the KGB skills he honed in Communist East Germany in the early 80s, Putin then created a Russia that is now more dangerous and rich than the previously known Soviet Union.  Putin was ashamed that the Soviet Union collapsed after the Berlin wall fell, and he wants it rebuilt, but not as the Soviet Union, but as an imperialist Russian Empire.  He doesn’t want to be president, he wants to be Czar.

He can do that now that Russia is one of the largest oil and gas producers and controls energy supplies into Europe.  He has rebuilt the Russian military, now has a warm water port after taking Crimea from Ukraine, quashed all opposition, changed the constitution so he can stay in power for life and has made elections there a joke.  Billionaire oligarchs support and protect him, and his drive to build a new Russian Empire is relentless.
And who’s happy about it?  TFG himself and his supporters. Last night Putin brazenly invaded Ukraine, even shelling facilities near Kyiv, and millions of Ukrainians, in disbelief that he actually attacked, are fleeing to the west.  On Tuesday, TFG call Putin a genius and said how smart he was to go in as a “peacekeeper”.  Last night, right before Putin launched attacks in to Kyiv and other cities, TFG did it again, praising Putin at a fund raiser at Mar a Lago, saying how smart Putin is, walking in “for two dollars worth of sanctions”, then ironically claiming that if he were in office,

“This would never have happened, ever in a million years, it would have never happened.  And I know him very well. I know him probably almost as well as I know anybody in this room other than Doc Ronny [Jackson].”

So, let’s be clear – TFG is characteristically praising, as he has for years, then tried to push blame onto Biden for Putin doing what he himself supports.  Of course, his sycophants fell in line, praising Putin and TFG, bashing Biden.

If anyone doubts what the US would look like during a second TFG term, just look at Russia today and listen to TFG’s actual words.  He dreams of being a dictator and almost accomplished that in 2020.  With the Republican Party in tatters and now virtually 100% aligned with TFG and Russia, the only thing standing in his way is the rest of us making sure he never gets close to the Oval Office ever again.

TFG and his supporters are using Putin to undermine Biden and the US government to his own advantage, and Putin is so long term focused and patient that I don’t have any doubt that another TFG victory in 2024 figures into his calculus in going after Ukraine today.  Even if he doesn’t succeed this time, he’ll just come back in 2025 as Trump holds the door open for him by lifting all sanctions (like he did in 2017) and undermining NATO while fantasizing doing the same thing to Mexico.

If one ever needed another justification for abolishing the Electoral College, TFG is it.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

We know the conspiracy theory pushed by Trump and his henchman, Rudy Giuliani is nonsensical.  Every intelligence agency says it’s nonsensical.  During House impeachment hearings, former US intelligence officer and Russian specialist implored Republican congressmen to stop repeating Russian propaganda that it was Ukraine, not Russia, who interfered in the 2016 election.  The entire story is bullshit, and we KNOW it’s bullshit.

Ever wonder where the story came from and why Trump repeats it ad nauseam?  Well, the Washington Post dropped the bombshell this week that Putin himself planted the story in a private meeting during the 2017 G20 summit in Hamburg, when he began publicly repeating the story.  The meeting, and the subsequent meeting in Helsinki had NO US OFFICIALS PRESENT and there are no notes of the meetings.  We all knew it was stupid for Trump to meet with Putin alone, now we’re beginning to understand the depth of that stupidity.  The Post used interviews with former WH officials to confirm the story.

Let’s recap.  Trump withheld Congressionally appropriated funds to Ukraine to extort the announcement of an “investigation” into Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election using the fabricated story that Joe Biden and his son hunter were somehow involved in Ukrainian corruption.  When caught, he immediately released the funds and claimed what dozens of people saw didn’t really happen.  Then he defied all subpoenas for documents, ordered current and former officials to not testify, and repeatedly lied to the public about what is really going on.  The narrative he uses on a daily basis likely came directly from Putin, a former KGB officer.

Christ on a Crutch.  This is about as bad as it gets while Trumpists scream there is no evidence, no wrongdoing, and all of this is just made up by Democrats.  Sheesh.

Trump has announced his new $3.9 billion toy, a new pair of Air Force One planes to take him around to his golf vacations.  These are actually the exact same planes that were on order when he came into office that he famously cancelled on Twitter.  Using Trump math, he claims that he saved the taxpayers $1.4 billion, but the original contract he “cancelled” was $4 billion (even acknowledged by him), and the new contract is $3.9 billion.  Of course; $4 billion – $3.9 billion = $1.4 billion in Tdollars.

The surprise, here, though, was not the new aircraft.  The surprise is that Trump’s throwing one more tradition onto the scrap pile, and that is the world famous paint job of Air Force One.  The polished aluminum, white, and sky blue paint job has been on every single Air Force One since JFK changed it from the original red and gold.  Kennedy believed that the previous paint job “looked too regal”.  So, Trump is doing exactly what you would expect, change the paint job.  But this time, he’s insisting on red, white and blue.  Patriotic, right?  Yes.  For Russia.  Here’s Vladimir Putin’s plane:

And now you know the rest of the story.

There is a place for anger, and THIS is it.

On Monday, while French kissing Putin on global television, Trump announced that Putin had proposed “an incredible idea” to him during their private session to address Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.  We now know what that “incredible idea” was, and I had to read it twice to believe it; the story was confirmed by Aunt Lydia Sarah Sanders yesterday in the first WH daily briefing held in two weeks.  The “idea”?  For Trump to allow Russian intelligence to question 11 American citizens, including former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and businessman Bill Browder, whose attorney was murdered in a Russian prison.

This “incredible idea” cynical demand is nothing more than Putin’s chess move against legitimate indictments of Russian intelligence officials for hacking DNC servers and conducting cyber war against the United States.  Bill Browder has been a thorn in Putin’s side for years for pointing out the corruption in his regime.  The murdered attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested for uncovering massive corruption in Russia which lead to hundreds of millions of dollars of laundered money being deposited in banks in the US and around the world.  The law passed in his name froze those assets and banned a number of Russian government officials and oligarchs from entering the US.  Putin and his gang hate that law, and have been trying to undermine it since its adoption.  Don’t forget that the meeting with Russian agents at Trump tower in the summer of 2016 was an effort to get the Magnitsky Act repealed.

The shocking thing about the current chapter in this entire sordid story of the love affair between Trump and his handler is that, instead of categorically condemning this demand, the White House IS ACTUALLY ENTERTAINING IT.  Are you kidding me?  And, of course, the invertebrates in Congress are responding as you would expect, mealy mouthed and cowering in the corner, terrified of Trump’s Twitterfingers.

There is a place for anger, and this is it.

UPDATE:  File this under “No Shit” – Saying he’s considering allowing Russian intelligence to interrogate former US ambassador Michael McFaul and others caused HUGE blowback yesterday and today around the world (especially from McFaul himself).  The invertebrates in Congress were actually able to pull themselves far enough vertical to raise their hands and were preparing a resolution condemning the idea when Aunt Lydia Sarah Sanders announced that Trump “disagrees” with the notion of handing Americans over to Putin’s Gulag.  Apparently, the WH now agrees that allowing US citizens to be interrogated by Russian intelligence is not a great idea.  To that we say, NO SHIT.